For months, President Donald Trump or members of his administration have used federal data showing a large increase in employment for U.S.-born workers and a decrease in employment among foreign-born workers to claim that “all net job creation” in his second term has been for citizens. And for months, multiple economists and labor experts have said that officials should not do that because these specific figures are misleading.
The figures can mislead because the reported levels of native- and foreign-born workers are influenced by predetermined population estimates for 2025 that the Census Bureau calculated in 2024.
In an August post on Substack, Jed Kolko, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, wrote that “the apparent boom” in employment of workers born in America “is just a statistical artifact” attributable to the way the population and employment estimates are determined.
“If someone is reporting the increased native-born employment, they are ignoring warnings by the Census Bureau not to do that,” he told us in an interview.
But that’s exactly what Trump and administration officials have done repeatedly.
“Before I entered office, 100% of all new net jobs were going to migrant workers,” Trump said during Dec. 9 remarks in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, for example. “Think of that, 100% of new jobs were going to migrants. These are government numbers, by the way. These are not Trump numbers. These are government numbers because they say, ‘Well, did Trump come up with these numbers?’ No, I didn’t … Migrant workers and illegal aliens got 100%. But since I took office, 100% of all net job creation has gone to American citizens.”
He then repeated a version of the claim about net job growth for only U.S. citizens in his prime-time address to the nation on Dec. 17.
Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics — touted in a Dec. 16 post on the White House website — do show that this year native-born employment increased by almost 2.7 million from January to November. On the other hand, employment for foreign-born individuals decreased by 972,000 in that period.
Trump is wrong to use foreign-born employment to mean “migrant workers and illegal aliens.” BLS says the foreign-born category includes “legally-admitted immigrants,” some of whom may have since become citizens, “refugees, temporary residents such as students and temporary workers, and undocumented immigrants.”
In addition, during Joe Biden’s presidency, the data show an increase of 7.5 million in native-born employment, more than the 6.5 million increase in foreign-born employment.
BLS publishes this employment data, which is based in part on its Current Population Survey, or CPS, a monthly survey of 60,000 households conducted by the Census Bureau for BLS. But the figures shouldn’t be used to make such comparisons, some experts have said.
Misleading Employment Levels
One of those experts, Kolko, who is also a former undersecretary for economic affairs at the Department of Commerce during the Biden administration, explained the reasons why the data are questionable in his August post. He said that Trump administration officials and others who had pointed to the BLS data to claim that there had been a massive increase in native-born employment were guilty of committing a “multiple-count data felony.”
At the time, the official figures showed that native-born employment was up 2.5 million through Trump’s first six months back in office.
“The statistical agencies explicitly warn that these data” from the CPS “are not suitable for sizing and trending the foreign-born and native-born populations,” Kolko said. He pointed to a September 2024 working paper by Census Bureau staff that said the bureau, because of the survey’s small sample size, “routinely cautions against using the CPS to estimate the size and the geographic distribution of the foreign-born population when other data are available.”
“In fact,” Kolko wrote, “the apparent boom in native-born employment is just a statistical artifact, arising from arcane rules about how the data are constructed and population levels are determined.”
Those arcane rules, he told us in an interview, involve the household survey and predetermined population estimates for 2025 that the Census Bureau calculated in 2024. Those “population controls,” as he referred to them, significantly influence the reported totals for native- and foreign-born workers.
“The way the CPS works, the foreign-born and native-born population add up to a predetermined forecast that was made last year,” he said by phone. “So, a big decline in the reported foreign-born population” based on the survey “is going to be offset by a reported increase in the native-born population.”
As an extreme example, Kolko wrote in August that if the entire foreign-born population vanished from the U.S., the CPS would automatically report that the native-born population increased by millions of people to equal the predetermined estimate of the total population.
And when the estimated native-born population increases, so does the estimated number of U.S.-born workers, as Ben Zipperer, senior economist for the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, explained in a September article.
Dean Baker, the founder and senior economist for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, another left of center group, said in a Dec. 1 analysis that there are “three obvious reasons why the CPS would show fewer foreign-born workers” in 2025.
One reason, he wrote, “is that some number of immigrants have actually left the country,” either leaving on their own or being deported. Another reason is that more immigrants, even ones in the country legally, may be reluctant and not respond to the survey. Finally, “immigrants may not answer the survey accurately,” meaning that some foreign-born residents may say they were born in the U.S. when they were not, he said.
Baker noted that BLS data show that while the reported foreign-born population 16 and older has declined since last year, the native-born population has increased by more than 5 million — a figure that he suggested is not believable. That is how the Trump administration gets “the explosion in employment for the native-born they are boasting about,” he said.
Kolko also said the reported increase in the native-born population is not realistic.
“The rate of immigration is slower this year, and it’s possible that the foreign-born population has declined,” he told us. “Immigration policy can cause the foreign-born population to grow faster or more slowly than forecast. But, in contrast, the native-born population typically grows at a predictable rate, because that’s based on fertility rates, the age distribution and mortality rates. So, aside from something like a pandemic, the native-born population typically doesn’t grow faster or slower than expected.”
“That’s why it is not plausible for the native-born population to jump the way it was reported in the CPS, and the way the CPS is constructed explains why we see this increase,” Kolko said.
Notably, data from a different monthly BLS survey of businesses, called the Current Employment Statistics, or CES, show that total U.S. employment increased by just 499,000 workers, on net, from January to November. That’s more than 1 million fewer net jobs added than the estimated increase of almost 1.7 million according to the CPS, which is the only survey of the two that breaks down native-born and foreign-born employment.
“We might expect a difference, since these are from different surveys (native/foreign from the CPS, total jobs from CES), but a difference of 1 million jobs in just 10 months is pretty big!” Jeremy Horpedahl, an associate professor of economics at the University of Central Arkansas, wrote in a Dec. 17 blog post.
We reached out to the White House about Trump’s claims, but didn’t receive a response.
Check Unemployment Rates
Rather than employment levels, Kolko told us to look at the reported unemployment rates, as he also suggested in his August piece.
“The unemployment rate is the best information the CPS offers about the native born and the foreign born. Ignore the levels of population and employment: they mislead,” he wrote.
David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, also told us to focus on the unemployment rate, because he said that is what the CPS was really designed to determine.
“The survey is meant not to establish how many people are in the United States, or how many people are in any subcategory. It’s meant to figure out what the people in the United States are doing,” he said. “Are they working? Are they not? Are they retired? Are they in school? That’s what the survey is supposed to do, and it’s supposed to look at the rate at which these things are happening. … That’s where the survey data is useful.”
The most recent BLS data show that the unemployment rate for the native-born population has not improved; it was 4.3% in November, the same as it was in January. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate for the foreign-born population was 4.4% last month, down from 4.6% at the beginning of the year.
Bier said the unemployment rate is a more reliable statistic because it’s not dependent on the number of people in the country.
“It’s really dependent on the number of people surveyed. And if you survey enough people, you’re going to get pretty close to the actual distribution of what those people are doing,” he said.
Kolko told us that the BLS only publishes the native-born and foreign-born employment levels to be transparent about the data that underlie the calculation of the unemployment rate. But the rates ultimately are not affected by the population controls in the CPS, he said, “so it is fine to look at the native-born unemployment rate and the foreign-born unemployment rate.”
In a Dec. 17 post on X, Kolko again advised the public: “Do not look at native-born LEVELS of anything — employment, unemployment, labor force, or population. These stats may be official but they are meaningless.”
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